Crime, Punishment And Children

Give Kids A Chance At Redemption

August 12, 1999|By Steven A. Drizin and Vincent Schiraldi. Steven A. Drizin is supervising attorney of Northwestern University School of Law's Children and Family Justice Center. Vincent Schiraldi is director of the Justice Policy Institute.

Bob Beamon, Olympic gold medalist and record-breaking long jumper, began getting into serious trouble with the law at the age of 9. So did Claude Brown, author of "Manchild in the Promised Land," the 1960s classic coming-of-age memoir. San Francisco District Atty. Terrence Hallinan had been arrested so many times during his youth that he was literally banished from Marin County at the age of 17.

These three "success stories" and 22 others are featured in a new book, "Second Chances," released in connection with the 100th anniversary of the first juvenile court's founding in Chicago on July 3, 1899. All the men and women featured in the book benefited from the treatment and protection of the juvenile court and the vision of Jane Addams, Lucy Flower and the other court founders.

In some cases, the court's emphasis on confidentiality allowed them to transcend their youthful indiscretions; for others, specific programs or caring adults profoundly influenced their life paths; and in other cases, the court simply afforded them the time to discover who they were and what they wanted to be. In all these cases, though, the court gave them the chance to learn from their mistakes and make better choices when next confronted with the temptation to break the law.

But as the court celebrates its centennial, Rep. Bill McCollum (R.-Fla.) is poised to strike a crippling blow to the philosophy that underpins the court. McCollum's bill, which recently passed the House, applies to federal crimes and would allow 13-year-olds to be jailed with adults, gives prosecutors non-reviewable discretion to try juveniles as adults and erodes the confidentiality rights of young people.

This is not the first time McCollum has sung this tune. In the mid-1990s he drafted the Violent Youth Predator Act, declaring about today's youth: "They're the predators out there, they're not children anymore. They're the most violent criminals on the face of the Earth." That McCollum is beating the same drum today, even after six years of declining juvenile crime and even after other prognosticators of doom have backed away from their earlier forecasts, should be a warning to us all.

Nor can McCollum and other politicians rightly claim credit for the drop in juvenile crime. That began in 1993, long before McCollum's road show. Moreover, states that have been more moderate on juvenile crime have experienced the same juvenile crime reductions as states that have gotten tougher. McCollum's state, Florida, the nation's leader in trying juveniles as adults, has the second-highest rate of juvenile crime, 48 percent higher than the national average. This is hardly an outcome he should be exporting to the rest of the country.

If anything is responsible for the 44 percent drop in juvenile homicide charges over the last six years, it is improving economic conditions for teenagers (and their parents) and diminished access to handguns. Between 1995 and 1997, when the juvenile homicide rate was plummeting, the adolescent unemployment rate dropped by 10 percent. This, coupled with increases in the minimum wage and more jobs for adults, significantly improved the financial picture for today's teens. And, in 1995, it became illegal under federal law for teenagers to possess handguns or ammunition. States and local jurisdictions, passing more restrictive measures, have also helped keep guns out of the hands of kids.

The number of juvenile homicides in Washington, D.C., for example, has dropped an astonishing 63 percent since neighboring Virginia and Maryland restricted gun sales, at the very time when the number of kids locked up in Washington dropped by half. Coupling reasonable gun control measures with comprehensive community-based efforts to persuade kids not to use guns to settle their disputes, Boston went for 2 1/2 years without a single child being killed by a gun.

Statistics aside, the human costs of passing McCollum's bill are dramatic. Would Bob Beamon have brought home the gold if he had been sent to an adult prison? Would he have gone on to mentor and inspire countless disadvantaged youths if he had been sent to adult court instead of to an alternative school? Would Terrence Hallinan have gone to law school, become D.A. and helped reduce San Francisco's juvenile crime rate by 27 percent if McCollum's bill were law when he was a teen?